To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Saturday, January 23, 2016

From Technicians of the Sacred (expanded): Six Poems of Desperation by Worker Poet Xu Lizhi

after false starts you came here to the world’s largest equipment
factory

and began standing, screwing in screws, doing overtime, working
overnight

painting, finishing, polishing, buffing,

packaging and packing, moving finished products

bending down and straightening up a thousand times each day

dragging mountain-sized piles of merchandise across the workshop floor

the seeds of illness were planted and you didn’t know it

until the pain dragged you to the hospital

and that was the first time you heard

the new words “slipped disc in the lumbar vertebra”

and each time you smile when you talk about the pain and the past

we’re moved by your optimism

until at the annual New Years party, you drunkenly

grasped a liquor bottle in your right hand, and held up three fingers
with your left,

you sobbed and said:

“I’m not even thirty

I’ve never had a girlfriend

I’m not married, I don’t have a career—

and my whole life is already over.”

(China)

Source: Eleanor Goodman, “Obituary for a
Peanut: The creatively cynical world of worker poet Xu Lizhi,” in China
Labour Bulletin, January 6, 2016.

What emerges here is something beyond a state & party controlled
“workers poetry” but the continuation & development of a popular literature
written in the vernacular & confronting the fullest range of human thoughts
& feelings, even the most skeptical, negative & self-destructive. Of Xu Lixhi (1990-2014), Eleanor Goodman
writes as translator: “Xu
Lizhi is an excellent example of a modern incarnation of the century-old baihua, or vernacular, poetry tradition.
His language comes out of the factory and life lived in the lower rungs of
society, and revolves largely around nouns: words like screw and worksheet and
twice-cooked meat. He tells the stories of workers, of his immediate world, and
of his own psyche in plain but moving terms. The baihua movement began as a revolt against the rarified and largely
inaccessible language of traditional Chinese literature. Today, there is no longer
a strong division between the Chinese as formally written and as spoken, or
between common speech and ‘literary’ speech. Nevertheless, a strong division
remains in literature in terms of subject matter and approach. Rather than
serving as a removed observer or a sympathizer of the plight of workers,
farmers, and the poor in contemporary China, Xu experienced this all
first hand. The fact that he could write about it with such eloquence and
simplicity is a testament to his skill with the language of everyday life, as
well as with poetic technique.”

And further: “I first came across Xu Lizhi’s poetry in the
film Our Verses, a documentary that
follows six different manual laborers who also write highly accomplished
poetry. As I translated the poetry and then the subtitles for the film, I was
immediately attracted to Xu’s straightforwardness, honesty, and darkness.
Although his life was clearly unhappy—indeed, he committed suicide at the age
of twenty-four by jumping out of a Foxconn factory dormitory window a little
over a year ago—there is very little self-pity evident in his poetry. Rather,
he casts a cold eye on the larger society, on the conditions in which he
worked, and on himself. His reality was one that millions of other people face
across China,
but particularly in the south, which has become a center of production and
exploitation. His ‘poem of shame’ is not a personal one, but a public and
national one.”

[N.B.
Eleanor Goodman’s book of translations, Something
Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (Zephyr Press, 2014) was the
recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and winner of the 2015 Lucien
Stryk Prize. A collection of her own poetry, Nine Dragon Island, which was shortlisted for the Drunken Boat First Book Prize, will be
published early next year.]

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A PROSPECTUS

In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.

[For a complete checklist of previous postings through January 12, 2012, see below. The slot at the upper left can also be used for specific items or subjects. More recent posts are updated regularly here.]